Exchange Server and Extended Server Usage Report

I have had some issues with the default reporting that Microsoft provides with Small Business Server 2003. The Extended Reports have often shown unusually high numbers of messages sent at my various clients. After a talk with an employee at a client site regarding a very unusually high number of messages sent (over 6K) I decided to nail it.

Recently I spent some time looking into the issue. I became concerned that maybe the servers or SMTP server was being compromised. First I looked into relay, and tested to make sure that relay's were disabled. I can never remember the syntax for the telnet session to the mail server so I keep this page book marked. That yielded no results which was a good sign, I then tried to authenticate and send, thinking maybe the server was allowing authenticated remote connections, and we had a compromised password. Again nope.

After these fairly quick checks it was time to play the goggle game. After a few searches and refining terms I found that there is a know bug in usage reporting tool, and how it counts E-mails. A single message to 4 recipients in 4 different domains ends up being counted as 16 outgoing mail messages (scratches head on that).

Anyway, hopefully this will help those out there who are seeing the same results in their reports.

You are reviewing your server reports right ?

Till next time:
Sean Riley
President, DogRiley